Welcome to another edition of…
Tracking words for young, emergent readers is crucial to their inital growth in reading. Research shows that having a clear understanding of concepts of print is a critical step for these readers.
Things like understanding words and spaces between words, tracking left to right, understanding how to open a book and where to start are all foundational skills young readers need.
If these skills are absent early readers often have a very difficult time transitioning from ‘pretend reading’ to advanced ‘finger pointing’ reading. They start to understand that spoken language correlates to written language and the symbols relate to sounds, etc. They need to make the connection that print guides the speech of the reader.
There are many ways to help your early readers tackle this important skill and many of them are engaging and ‘fun’ for kids to experiment with and improve upon.
One simple way is to go on a concepts of print HUNT. Have your kids in small group use magnifying glasses and search for the TITLE, SPINE, COVER, BACK of the BOOK, AUTHOR, TITLE PAGE, etc.
I’ve also found that kids LOVE to use pointers when they read…not all reading theorists support pointers while reading but after 25 years in education teaching reading I’ve found success with them.
There are ALL different kinds of tools you can use as finger pointers to build their one to one correspondence skills:
Some are:
There are sooo many options, you can turn a tongue depressor into virtually anything! I’ve decorated them with buttons and a ribbon scarf and made them snowmen, you can add glitter to the end and make it a wand.
You can buy cocktail stirrers on Amazon…shh! Don’t tell the kids. LOL I tell them they are coffee stirrers. I have a cute reindeer one the kids fight over like that I use in December from a fancy adult cocktail out at dinner one night.
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These are great, glitter wands that come in different color choices: aff link:
One of my favorite things to do with the magnifying glass pipe cleaner is to have them after reading a page find sight words in the text. Older kids like it too – I may ask them to show me from who’s point of view the story is or to find a vocabulary word in non fiction text…so many options.
These fun light sabers ( seen in the list above ☝ ) were born after a child requested them…so easy – pipe cleaner and black tape.
When you have your students point to the words that they are reading they start to recognize miscues more…if they are adding and/or omitting words the pointers make that mistake stick out more and they are more apt to ‘fix it’.
I hope this short list of ideas was helpful to you and something you consider adding into your reading group repetoire of tools you pull out.
I didn’t even get the chance to talk about how important this is for math as well, I love how somethings can easily transfer into different subjects for our littles.
As always…
happy teaching!
xoxo,
